Electroluxx: A New Vision of Nightlife

Electroluxx, an alternative nightlife movement, will be making its way down South to host one its unique parties at Los Angeles’ The Regent on May 14th. The San Francisco based production company strays away from the beaten path, and takes a refreshingly off-kilter stance on nightlife. It attempts to break the mold of overpriced drinks, long entry lines, and repetitive screensaver graphics, and infuse a new a holistic approach to nightlife. It is a place where anyone can express themselves, through mediums like dance, art, conversation, or just being present.

Comprised of Brett Mendenhall, Elliott Nathan, Alex Fonti and Danny Snodgrass, Electroluxx started back in late 2013 when the four friends living in San Francisco grew tired of the repetitive LGBT nightlife routine. They felt like every weekend was rinse and repeat, with the same music, same clubs, and same interactions. Their common desire was for a meaningful nightlife experience. They soon became inspired after attending the final weekly Sunday event of Honey Soundsystem, and decided to build something of their own. They pulled together the musicians and artists in their community and started what they called Sunday Mass. After starting small at The Chapel in San Francisco, Sunday Mass took place in other larger venues across the city. Co-founder Brett Mendenhall noted:

“We never want Electroluxx to feel stale, so we are constantly bringing our events to new venues.”

This continues to be a core value of Electroluxx – creating a temporary but powerful experience and engaging with the local community for a night. Their goal is to always find new spaces for their artists and audience to interact. In doing so, they hope to give back to community and provide opportunity for all who participate. Co-founder, Elliott Nathan, explained this in more detail:

“Rather than focusing on making huge profits, we reinvest all of the money earned back into the production to bring in more visual and experiential artists, more DJs and musicians and rent larger venues with opportunities for multiple stages and huge music lineups. We want to be a springboard for artists and musicians to showcase their current projects and we never gouge our customers, I believe this sets us apart from the regular production companies.”

And they will do that just that on Saturday. With doors opening at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, the dance party will include two stages, wild costumes, lasers, 3D projection art, massages, virtual reality, face painting, a photo booth, a gallery and more. The show will feature a bevy of established and rising artists, including Fred Falke, Kristina Sky, Tropics, Strange Talk, Lavelle Dupree, DJ TRACER, The Sometimes Island, superinto.it, DJ Show Pony, and JoaqoPelli.

Tickets are still available and can be purchased HEREand make sure you check out their video teaser HERE compiled from footage from their last parties. (See complete image gallery at bottom of page.)

We caught up with three can’t miss acts at Electroluxx and talked to them a little about the event, their inspirations, and more:

Fred Falke

What attracted you to play at Electroluxx?

“Since it is the closing show of my Spring US Tour I really wanted this to be the climax and therefore it had to be here in LA, there was no second thought. I moved to LA a while ago and it’s been love all the way, and even before that this city influenced my music. It was then obvious to throw a party with the people from Electroluxx since they are among the best ones!”

What inspires you about Los Angeles?

“Born and raised in France, I grew up on american music and movies, and LA has always been heavily related to both, and I still have this foreigner exotic vision about the city, it has this unique vibe that you can’t find anywhere else in the world, to me it’s a killer combo of trends, old fashioned lives next to the hypest, it’s 60’s meet 90’s meet 22nd century… this amazing era mixing feeling that is super inspiring to me.”

What is your ideal setting for a show? What audience do you seek?

“I really love to play an open air show, it’s got that sweet sunset and summertime combo, you know… but when it come to banging beats nothing can touch that “inside da club” vibe, crowd, lights, smoke, mirror ball, and arms raised up in the air.

To me a great show is all about the crowd, and I embrace any audience that I’m playing for ! There’s no bad audience, who would go out to a show with that motto “I’m going out tonight because I really want to get bored, I really dont wanna dance”

No, let’s face it there’s no bad audience, just bad DJs… It seems that over the past years there’s been an inverse proportion between the DJ’s ego and how good they are, and that’s a shame because the audience is what this is all about.”

What was your vision for your latest EP, Alpha? What inspired it? How did it change over time?

“The idea with Alpha, was to create a kind of audio recap of my sound, like when you watch a TV show and you have that “previously in…”, well that was the starting point with the EP.

I wanted to bring together different sounds that are all from my own palette, future disco with Radio Days, alternative electro pop with It’s A Memory, All Of My Love brings that classic french touch flavor, and Crepuscule is the track I want to listen to when I drive through LA at night, it’s been inspired by these synthesizer driven soundtracks from the late 80’s early 90’s that I grew upon.

Radio Days was an instrumental track at first, and as I was listening to the premix in my car, I suddenly thought “this track needs a radio voice on it!”, and who else than Shotgun Tom Kelly would have embodied that LA radio voice?”

You are a prolific remix artist. How does your remix style carry over into your original productions or vice versa?

“Thank you! What I really love about remixing songs is that it gives me the opportunity to blend my vision of a track with the artist’s original one’s, and bring the song to another level with a different sound and a new angle.

9 times out of 10, I just keep the original vocals, then I rebuild a whole new piece of music around it, so in that, it’ s almost as if I was creating an original track…

Remixes and originals are to me completely interconnected, there are like two sides of the same coin, imagine a gold coin with my left profile on one side and the words « Fred Falke Remix » carved on the other one!”

Tropics

What attracted you to play at Electroluxx?

“I recently dj’d with Bondax at the Echoplex which was one of my first official dj sets in LA, well at least since I landed here for the long term. The vibe was great and its something I desire to do, and be a part of all over the city. Im a big fan of Fred Falke also, so that made me wanna be a part of the party.”

What about Los Angeles inspires you ?

“I lived in London for a handful of years, Los Angeles is a very welcome change of scenery.. And a big change it is! If I want to make music then go for a walk by the sea, up a mountain, or even play my music back to myself out in the desert: all of these places are just a drive away. That still blows my mind a bit.”

What is your ideal setting for a show? What audience do you seek?

“I love playing intimate and early sets actually, but I also love a longer set that fills out and the vibe and people just keep building and building. I do love a set more on the chill side of house and electronic music where I can throwback to 70’s funk at times. The set will vary on the atmosphere. I dunno, audience, i just like a tentative, happy, smiling, audience haha. That’s why we’re all there right? To have fun. With the live show, definitely intimate, smaller gigs have been my favourite, dark room, beautiful lighting, spot light on me sat at the piano and rhodes, my drummer and guitarist on point. Actually I can’t wait to tour again just thinking about this!”

Tell us about your most recent music projects.

“Im keeping my cards close to my chest at the moment but it’s early days for me writing new music, developing and evolving my style more, a new theme, a new challenge. That’s what every release is about for me, a new challenge.. Which results in a new sound, so don’t expect to hear the same thing again! I think that’s why my releases have rather long periods of time in between them, I’d put it down to me wanting to learn some new style or genre that I haven’t dabbled in making before, but have become very inspired by. The learning and figuring out my own way of portraying a new genre is the long process.

We’re at this bizarre stage in popular music at the moment where everything seems to be battling each other and trying to out do each other. We have this popular electronic music that is a machine, keeps on churning out the ‘safe’ new versions of what has previously done well but at the same time a few people are doing interesting things. Occasionally the interesting things catch on but it seems like it has to force its way in with a great effort, and we still have all this noisy plastic music going on in the background. It seems we’ve lost a lot of the beauty of subgenre’s a bit too, which peaked several years back and then everything amalgamated and became this one big ‘pop’ effort… Under the surface interesting things will be brewing, they have for every decade and its time for something very new from the underground, in my opinion. I’ll continueto work in my own world on my releases and some collaborations I’ve been asked to do, which I find are my own chance to make an effort of interesting adjustment to electronic dance music, so thats fun for me.”

What’s next for you in production? In touring?

“Im not currently touring but djing and looking to start collaborating and starting parties in LA. I love an excuse to DJ and throw a party. But yeah the majority of my time now is just writing as much new music as possible for myself and for others.”

Strange Talk

What attracted you to play at Electroluxx?

“They obviously throw great parties and the fact we’ll be playing with one of our favorite producers/DJs, Fred Falke!!”

What inspires you about Los Angeles?

“We just honestly love LA, it’s like our second home. You are also surrounded by like-minded driven people from all over the world here for the same reasons as you. You never know who you’ll bump into or end up in the studio with.”

What is your ideal setting for a show? What audience do you seek?

“Anyone with an open mind musically and want to come on journey with us and have a good time. We like to mix up out DJ sets so they are always fresh and never boring.”

Tell us about your most recent music projects.

“We’ve been super busy lately working on our new EP which will feature quite a few guests and also producing and remixing other artist likenJarryd James, Colleen D’Agostino, Maize, etc.”

What’s next for you in production? In touring?

“Finishing up all the new tracks we’ve written while being in LA for last month including a collab with Fred and also all production/remixes. Then I think we’re aiming to do US DJ tour followed by a big live show tour next year.”